Cleanfeed - Usenet Filtering

Table Of Contents

Overview

Cleanfeed is Usenet filter written in Perl. It is designed to integrate with a
variety of news applications, although in recent times has been primarily tested
against INN v2. In order to use
it, INN must be compiled with Perl support:

./configure --with-perl

Perl version 5.8 or later is also strongly recommended.

History

Cleanfeed was originally developed by Jeremy Nixon who maintained it until
1998. At that time futher developments were taken on by Marco D'Itri who
produced the last release in August 2001, with a beta version following in May
2002. I produced a couple of updates in December 2007 that were designed to
address hipcrime type floods that were plaguing some groups I followed at the
time. In accordance with Cleanfeed's license, I published these and announced
them in news.software.nntp. The announcement is archived on
Google Groups

This update was met with surprising enthusiasm and resulted in other people
posting a number of updates and bugfixes that I subsequently included. From
that time I've done some other updates and produced these webpages to guide
newcomers in using Cleanfeed.

I'd like to thank Jeremy and Marco for their work on Cleanfeed and also all the
regulars of news.software.nntp who have offered encouragement, patches and
suggestions since I made my first update. Without all these people, Cleanfeed
wouldn't be such a useful tool as it is today.

Assumptions

It is assumed that the server operator already understands INN to a reasonable
level and has it installed and running.

A basic understanding of Perl will prove valuable in order to customise the
default Cleanfeed installation. Customisation is inevitable as no two Usenet
servers operate with quite the same policies.

A good understanding of Perl
Regular Expressions is essential before trying to customise the
installation. Getting these wrong will result in unwanted behaviour that can
be very difficult to isolate and rectify.

Many of the examples given assume Cleanfeed files have been installed to the
default locations. If you've chosen to put them elsewhere then you will need
to adjust the examples accordingly.